Air currents were too weak to whisk it along. For more than 36 hours, torrential downpours came in waves.

Zaleski and other forecasters at the National Weather Service’s Peachtree City outpost stood watch as aimless Alberto hovered overhead. On July 6, it jogged a clockwise curlicue and wandered toward Alabama, where it died the next day.

“Watching the system basically do an about-face over Atlanta and work its way back southwestward where it had already dumped a tremendous amount of rain was quite an amazing thing,” Zaleski says.

The slow-moving storm had waddled ashore in Florida’s Panhandle on July 3, largely unheralded.

After all, it was no hurricane. Folks figured it’d spill a few inches of needed rain before sailing off to the northeast. As Zaleski puts it, hurricanes are typically considered the big boys, the grown-ups, the adults of tropical weather systems. Tropical storms, he says, absent ferocious winds, are the children.

But, Zaleski says, “Alberto was a problem child.”

As it slogged along, the storm dumped more than 27 inches of rain near Americus, some 20 inches of it, there and in other spots, falling in a span of 24 hours.

In Macon, where more than a foot of rain fell in a three-day period, the churning Ocmulgee River, which surged past 35 feet -- almost twice its flood stage -- swamped the city’s water plant.

Reporters from across the country descended.

“It started raining,” a local woman told USA Today, “and may never stop.”

Zaleski, the weather man, took calls from news outlets as far away as Austrailia.

“It was,” he says, “an historic event.”

When the rain finally stopped, a journalist said to him by phone, “Well, we’ve got blue sky now, looks like things are fine.”

“No,” Zaleski replied, “things aren’t fine.”

For as he spoke, biblical amounts of water had nowhere to flow but south.

* * *

Twenty years have passed since the bad rains came.

The local landscape has changed in the aftermath of floodwaters that submerged downtowns in places like Montezuma, devouring homes along the Flint River and, on the Ocmulgee, deep-sixing Macon’s drinking-water supply.

Back then, there were still a handful of Bibb County public schools without air conditioning. Macon Mall had yet to expand. The minor-league Braves were in town. The Wilson Convention Centre hadn’t been tacked on to the Coliseum. Across the Ocmulgee on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, the Georgia Music Hall of Fame was two years from opening.

As Macon geared up to go weeks without running water, then-Macon-Bibb County Emergency Management Agency Director Johnny Wingers did his best to help locals survive the quagmire.

“Everybody was wanting to help,” he says.

Some 2,300 people volunteered at drinking-water stations and pretty much wherever they were needed. Many of them worked around the clock.

One day early in the crisis, Wingers heard panicked cries.

A crew was running a hose from the river bed up to a relief station in the old Kmart parking lot on Riverside Drive. The Army was pumping water from the Ocmulgee for people to use to flush their toilets.

The hose crew, trudging through muddy water, had come upon something scary.